outdoors

There was a lot of noise going on. While there were plenty of boisterous and colorful fireworks blasting off into the night sky during the extended July 4 holiday weekend, the local fishing scene also witnessed its own cacophony of activity on several fronts, as angler participation leaped into full summer mode. Some much-appreciated warm and...

Try to look beyond the madding crowd. There’s a lot going on in the world of nature, all of it free of charge. North America’s tiniest hummingbird, the calliope from the Pacific Northwest, has come to nectar alongside a ruby-throated male at Joanne Dittmar’s house in Springs on the bay just west of Hog Creek. Sibley defines it as an “accidental.”...

As the season changes from spring to summer, it’s always been a bit hard for me to fathom that our exposure to natural daylight is already on the downhill. A sunrise of 5:15 a.m. on June 21 in Montauk is 5:18 a.m. a week later. It’s only a three-minute difference, but the daylight does begin to erode rather quickly.

There’s an old saw that says “there’s more than one way to skin a cat.” It doesn’t actually have to do with removing the pelts from cats, thank God, but more with alternative ways of getting something done that needs to be done. In humankind as in nature, just about every method to get a given thing done has been tried. Some methods fail outright...

More time on the water does not necessarily equate to more fish caught. And that’s just fine. Whether or not I bring home a fish for dinner is not the point. Just being on the water is what truly matters.

The blue-green organisms that cause the slicks on the local coastal ponds like Lake Agawam, Mill Pond, and Georgica Pond, to name a few of the worst blighted, are among the oldest organisms known to man.

My memory of watching the movie “Jaws” for the first time shortly after its release in June of 1975 still stands clear in my mind. Its effect on me, and others at the time, was profound. Since that day, I’ve lost count of how many dozens of times I have seen it on TV, and yet I still get the chills watching several of its scenes.

Sunday night was cloudy and cool with a slight breeze. I set out for a second night on the trail of the once common but now rare whippoorwill. Last Thursday the Noyac and Bridgehampton hills were under my microscope. Sunday night it would be Northwest Woods in East Hampton and Napeague. I didn’t hear a single whippoorwill the first night. I was...

Despite launching my boat for the season back on March 13, an overly aggressive early date, this spring’s copiously rainy and windy weather left very few opportunities to wet a line and finally put some fresh fish on the table.